Women and disability: exploring the interface of multiple disadvantage

In general, women with disabilities are more discriminated against and disadvantaged than men with disabilities. In the industrialised countries there are consistent, although not necessarily large, gender differences in income, employment and education for people with disabilities. Poverty and deprivation magnify these inequalities, and can determine access to food, care and social inclusion, and even threaten survival. Women with disabilities are also at greater risk of physical, mental and sexual abuse, and because of stigmatisation have lower marriage prospects. There are more barriers to access and participation for women than for men, and mothers and caregivers in particular face enormous challenges when raising children with disabilities or chronic illnesses, especially within the context of women-headed households and early pregnancy. This article emphasises the need to approach disability as an integral part of development rather than as a separate need competing with other causes and manifestations of poverty.     

The impact of circular migration on a village economy

The author examines the economy of a rural village in Indonesia in which a high proportion of households rely on remittances from urban informal sector earnings. Household income and per capita income are analyzed according to whether or not households have at least one temporary migrant, and by the sex and age of the household head. Findings indicate that "remittances from short-term circular migration push many households into the middle and upper income ranges. However, the wealthiest households continue to rely on traditional high earning activities and do not depend on remittances. The poorest households are scattered among those who rely on remittances and those still totally dependent upon traditional low earning village activities, regardless of the sex and age of the household head."     

Firm agglomeration and local poverty reduction: evidence from an economy in transition

We examine the linkages between firm agglomeration and the welfare of households in Vietnam. We measured firm agglomeration by per capita firm output at the district level and household welfare by per capita income, expenditure, and poverty. We find that firm agglomeration helps households move from the informal sector to the formal sector. As a result, there is a positive effect of firm agglomeration on per capita income, per capita expenditure, and poverty reduction, albeit of a small and time‐decreasing magnitude. The effect of firm agglomeration on per capita expenditure tends to be higher for households with men, younger, and more educated heads than households with women, older, and less educated heads. Households in rural areas and those that do not have crop land are more likely to benefit from firm agglomeration than those living in urban areas and having crop land.     

WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT IN ZIMBABWE: EVIDENCE FROM A CONTINGENT VALUATION STUDY

If communities living adjacent to the elephant see it as a burden, then they cannot be its stewards. To assess their valuation of it, a contingent valuation method study was conducted for one CAMPFIRE district in Zimbabwe. Respondents were classified according to their preferences over the elephant. The median willingness to pay for the preservation of 200 elephants is ZW$260 (US$4.73) for respondents who considered the elephant a public good and ZW$137 (US$2.49) for those favouring its translocation. The preservation of 200 elephants yields an annual net worth of ZW$10,828 (US$196) to CAMPFIRE households. However, the majority of households (62%) do not support elephant preservation. This is one argument against devolution of elephant conservation. External transfers constitute one way of providing additional economic incentives to local communities.     

Impact of Foreign Maids on Female Labor Force Participation in Malaysia

Demand for foreign maids by households in Malaysia has increased rapidly and expected to affect female labor force participation. Simple comparisons of households with maids and those without suggest that maids raise the participation rate of their female employers by 26 percentage points. However, such comparisons are not directly comparable. Households employing maids differ in many ways from those that do not. When propensity score matching methods are used to estimate the treatment effect of having a foreign maid, the female labor force participation rate is estimated to be only 18 percentage points higher in 1993/1994 and 13 percentage points higher in 2004/2005. This decline over time in the treatment effect is not apparent when simpler but potentially biased methods are used. The small and declining impact of hiring maids suggests financial losses to the host households.     

Debt and household finance: evidence from the Financial Diaries

The Financial Diaries data-set is a unique, new set of year-long daily income, expense and financial transactions for households from three different areas of South Africa. These data show that over-indebted households (those that spend 20 per cent or more of their gross monthly income on debt) do not fit one homogeneous profile. Formal debt tends to be responsible for over-indebtedness in the urban areas, while in the rural areas the cause tends to be informal debt. In the urban areas high indebtedness is more prevalent among medium-income and high-income households, whereas in the rural areas it occurs at all income levels. High indebtedness in grant-dependent rural households tends to be persistent, whereas in wage-dependent urban households it is often short-lived. These findings present a new financial picture of poor rural populations that is unlikely to be touched by recent policy measures to address over-indebtedness.     

Who are the heads of household,what do they do,and is the concept of headship useful? An analysis of headship in South Africa

In most household surveys, headship is not defined by objective criteria but is self-identified by respondents. The first part of this article examines whether self-reported heads in South Africa are those household members in whom more control over decision-making is vested. Although the head is typically found to be the oldest household member, there is also a strong relationship between headship and the highest income-earner in the household. Furthermore, heads have final say over decisions even when they do not earn the most income. This is the case particularly in households headed by women. The second part of the article evaluates whether the gender of the head provides a useful marker for distinguishing between household types and their access to resources. Female- and male-headed households are not homogeneous groupings, and male-headed households are not equally advantaged. However, female-headed households in South Africa on average contain fewer income-earners, whose income is also lower, than male-headed households. Overall, therefore, households headed by women are considerably more likely to be economically vulnerable.     

A note on black economic well-being in the North and West

Conclusion These very positive gains in economic well-being for certain categories of black families do not surprise us. Those in which the head is under 35 and live in the North and the West have had relatively more opportunity open to them as a result of some of the strong enforcement policies of the late sixties and affirmative action programs. This group of the black population, by and large, is better educated, more mobile, and more job-ready. It is, therefore, in a position to be more productive and thereby earn relatively higher incomes when society relaxes some of its discriminating tendencies. No such advantages, however, are available to the households headed by females or older households which comprise the overwhelming members of families in poverty.     

Peasant communes and factor markets in late nineteenth-century Russia

The peasant land commune was the emblematic institutional feature of agrarian Russian society before the Revolution of 1917. Economic historians have long blamed the commune for restricting household behavior in ways that contributed to Russia's economic “backwardness” by the late 19th century. Drawing on new household-level data collected from archival sources in Moscow province, this article provides the first microeconomic analysis of local factor markets and household behavior within the institutional context of the Russian peasant commune. The empirical evidence indicates that peasant households did have substantial flexibility when it came to allocating their land and labor holdings. In response to mortality shocks or lags in the communal adjustment of land, households engaged in land rentals and off-farm labor market transactions to improve upon suboptimal factor endowments. Although these findings do not imply that the resulting allocation of resources was fully efficient, they do illustrate how peasants made rational factor market transactions in a seemingly inhospitable institutional environment.     

LINKING POVERTY AND INCOME SHOCKS TO RISKY SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR: EVIDENCE FROM A PANEL STUDY OF YOUNG ADULTS IN CAPE TOWN

Is there a link between household income and income stress, and risky sexual behaviour of young people? Anecdotal and qualitative evidence suggests this may be the case, but there is little quantitative research measuring this relationship. We use two waves of new data from the Cape Area Panel Study to investigate this link for 2,993 African and coloured youths aged 14 to 22 in 2002. In the process, we discuss one type of research design that could allow for a causal interpretation of the effect of income poverty on HIV risk. This design plausibly separates out the effect of income stress from the effect of living in a poor household by comparing behaviours across households with and without negative economic shocks, conditional on baseline income. Our results indicate that females in poorer households are more likely to be sexually active in 2002 and more likely to sexually debut by 2005. In addition, girls in households experiencing negative economic shocks are more likely to reduce condom use between 2002 and 2005. However, they are less likely to have multiple partners in 2002 or have transitioned to multiple partners by 2005. Males who experienced a negative shock are more likely to have multiple partners. Despite the tight research design for assessing shocks, the findings on the impacts of shocks do not generate clear recommendations for policy. There appears to be no systematic difference in condom use at last sex by household income levels or income shocks.     

EXPLORING ATTRITION BIAS: THE CASE OF THE KHAYELITSHA PANEL STUDY (2000-2004)

Attrition bias is a problem for users of panel data. Researchers need to know what socio‐economic factors are associated with attrition, and whether this is of relevance for the kind of analysis they want to conduct. This paper discusses attrition bias in the 2000/2004 Khayelitsha panel study. It shows that women, shack‐dwellers and people living in smaller households are more likely to attrit, but that the impact of these variables on the probability of attrition is relatively small. The implications for labour‐market analysis are then explored using Mincerian earnings functions and a probit regression on whether respondents are wage‐employed or not. The coefficients generated using a restricted sample of non‐attritors do not differ significantly from those generated by the entire sample. This suggests that attrition bias in this particular data set is not a problem for this kind of labour market analysis.     

Moving to the right place at the right time: Economic effects on migrants of the Manchuria Plague of 1910–11

How do initial arrival conditions in a host locality affect migrants’ subsequent economic welfare? Manchuria (Northeast China), which attracted millions of migrants from North China during the first half of the twentieth century, experienced a devastating pneumonic plague outbreak in 1910–11. Using data from a rural household survey in the mid-1930s, we explore how the post-plague conditions in various villages affected migrant cohorts’ long-term wealth accumulation. We find that the migrant households that moved to plague-hit villages soon after the plague ended prospered the most: they owned at least 112% more land than migrant households that either moved elsewhere or migrated to the same village before or long after the plague outbreak. Our results are robust after controlling for factors that influence the long-term wealth accumulation of migrants and are not caused by selection.     

Unemployment and Food Insecurity in Urban Ethiopia

Although unemployment is often associated with food insecurity, the paths through which it leads to food insecurity is less explored. This study investigates the effects of unemployment on food insecurity based on data collected from 410 randomly selected households in Addis Ababa and the Munessa district of Arsi Zone. Binary logistic regression was used to analyze the data. The results show that 55.9 percent of the respondents were unemployed and only 12.4 percent of the households were food secure. The prevalence of food insecurity was higher among households headed by unemployed persons. Education and economic factors are the mechanisms through which unemployment leads to food insecurity. Lack of education reduces the chance of employment and the quality of jobs engaged in whilst the economic path to food insecurity is partly related to the inability of poor households to cope with soaring food prices and seasonal unemployment. Thus, increasing employment opportunities through pro‐poor measures is a means to enhance human capital development that helps the people take advantage of the labour market and improve the economic status of households, ultimately leading to ensuring food security.     

城市最低生活保障兼有消费改善与劳动供给激励效应吗?

最低生活保障制度是我国社会保障体系中兜底性、基础性的制度安排,是保障民生、促进分配公平、维护经济安全和社会稳定的重要机制.本文通过对城市低保制度消费改善与劳动供给效应的综合评估发现,我国城市低保从整体上改善了受助家庭的消费状况,影响了受助家庭的消费结构,起到了提升经济福利的效果,但是对受助家庭的劳动供给激励效应还比较小...     

The Impact of Increased School Enrollment on Economic Growth in Tanzania

Abstract: Two different positions prevail in the recent discussion on the impact of education on economic growth: those who support a positive correlation between schooling and economic growth rates and those who claim that the impact of schooling on growth has been overstated. What is intriguing about this discussion is that both positions are based on theory and the results from empirical studies. We examine the long‐term effects of increased school enrollment (and effective attendance) on economic growth in Tanzania using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (DCGE) model. We find that an increase in human capital formation in the long run leads only to a moderate increase of economic growth rates but to a substantial improvement of factor incomes to low‐education households, while overall income effects are Pareto efficient.     

Food, nutrition, and substitution in the late nineteenth century

Economic historians hypothesize that households in the nineteenth century substituted away from carbohydrates and fiber and towards protein and fat as their incomes rose. Anthropometric historians assert that there was increased nutrient intake without any nutritional substitution. I test these hypotheses using the 1888 Cost of Living Survey. I fail to reject the hypothesis that the income elasticity of fiber is greater than or equal to the income elasticities of protein, fat, or sugar—contrary to the nutritional substitution posited by economic historians. A food modified Engel curve reveals that the shares of carbohydrates, fat, and sugar in the diet vary with household income, but the shares of protein and fiber do not. I do find, however, that the share of protein from animal sources increases with household income. I also find that the diets of late nineteenth century industrial workers were surprisingly balanced by modern standards.     

Migration and the changing social economy of Windhoek,Namibia

This study focuses on the economic strategies employed by poor urban households in Windhoek, Namibia. It is based on the findings of a household questionnaire survey conducted in Windhoek and qualitative case studies collected in both Windhoek and the rural northern regions of Namibia. The central argument of this article is that rural–urban migration in Namibia is not unilinear but involves a complex relationship between rural and urban households that is fostered by high levels of personal mobility between the rural and urban settings. These close and complex social linkages between the rural and urban sectors make it possible for people to withstand the economic difficulties associated with limited employment in the formal urban economy. Further, this study shows that a key survival factor for urban households is in fact food that is produced in the rural areas.     

新疆样本县（市）农户借贷行为调查分析

本文通过对新疆玛纳斯县、呼图壁县、吉木萨尔县、吐鲁番市、托克逊县农村信用社和农户的实地调查,对农户的借贷需求行为进行了分析,得出了农户借贷行为的特征。本文认为农户的经济行为特征和资金需求特征对其金融需求具有十分重要的影响。     

Perceptions of economic and financial conditions of households in 2000

'The economy grew by 3,0 per cent in 2000. This was the fastest growth since 1996, buoyed by a strong recovery in household consumption spending and an increase in exports of over 7 per cent in real terms' (Trevor Manuel, Minister of Finance, Budget speech, 21 February 2001). 'Growth won't solve our problems. The faster the economy grows, the faster will be the creation of jobs for the highly skilled. So there will be more, not fewer, problems with income disparity' (Iraj Abedian, Standard Bank Group Economist, cited in Financial Mail , 2001a). The aim of this article is to examine the extent to which economic growth, experienced in 2000, improved the financial and economic conditions of South African households, by analysing a national representative survey of 2 700 adult South Africans conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council in September 2000. The survey results were analysed by disaggregating data by race, gender, area type, province and Living Standard Measure (LSM). The theme emerging from this article is that although the majority of households were negatively affected financially and economically, proportionally more Africans, women, rural residents and poor households were hardest hit. Although South Africa achieved a 3 per cent economic growth rate in 2000, there is limited evidence to suggest that this growth trickled down to the majority of households.     

Economic policy uncertainty and household consumption: Evidence from Chinese households

We find that households reduce their consumption in response to higher economic policy uncertainty (EPU). Compared with lower income households, high income group is more severely affected which can be explained by the portfolio choice of illiquid asset and liquid asset. In addition, the uncertainty effect is more pronounced among older, wealthier, well-educated and urban households. The impact of EPU on household consumption is also persistent. Holding more liquid asset and commercial insurance represent important channels in mitigating the negative effect of EPU on household consumption.